Quotes

This is a collection of quotes that speak to me, that resonate with my design philosophy, and align with what’s important to me. I’ve arranged them into a flow that has meaning and impact. Each one builds on the next. If you have any you’d like to contribute, please comment.

“There is no difference between life and design for a real designer!”
— Marco Romanelli

“Inspiration. From real life. I open my eyes and I travel and I look. And I read everything.”
— Erik Spiekermann

“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”
— Paul Rand

“Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.”
— Tim Cook

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
— Hans Hofmann

“The challenge is about taking things that are infinitely complex and making them simpler and more understandable.”
—Robert Greenberg

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. […] It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. […] You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”
— Steve Jobs

If you focus on what you’ve left behind, you will never be able to see what lies ahead”
— Chef Gousteau from Ratatouille (Pixar)

“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”
— unknown

“Satisfaction is doin’ what’s important to yourself. A man ought to honor other people, but he’s got to honor what he believes in too.”
— Madison Wheeler, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon

“Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only the important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
— Steve Jobs

“The fact that Latin America does not have the same kind of typographic tradition that exists in Europe and the United States is important and relevant because it means we can try out new things without fear, without prejudices, without a past and with a lot of future.”
— Daniel Hernández, Chilean type designer, LatinoType

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”
— Steve Jobs

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“You can’t let the people around you define your happiness.”
— Kevin Schwall

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
— Mark Twain

“To believe something strongly when it is clearly hard to define and prove, and has not been proven, is to be prejudiced.”
— Simon Ramo, Ph.D.

“Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.”
— Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts (p. 858)

“Faced with a choice, do both.”
Dieter Rot/Roth

“The interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.”
— Richard St. John

“From that moment on, I’ve dedicated myself to type design full-time (and more). It’s been a crucial decision for me, because type design is something I am passionate about; and there is nothing more rewarding in life than doing what you love to do — your work.”
— Daniel Hernández, Chilean type designer, LatinoType

“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. […] When you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”
— Steve Jobs

“I usually work on two projects at once, in order to be able to move away and look at it from a new perspective when I get back to it. That helps me a lot to keep things fresh. Yet I think my main “strategy” is to work on projects that are inspiring, fun and motivating.”
— Daniel Hernández, Chilean type designer, LatinoType

“We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what’s driven me.”
— Steve Jobs

“If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.”
— Jim Collins

“and then there is using everything”
— Gertrude Stein

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”
— unknown

“Meaningful, great art is a transcendental experience that lifts us out of the world and makes us look back and view the world more critically.”
— Dr. Damian White, professor in RISD’s liberal arts department

“Art exists to define the ‘undefinable,’ to make the impossible possible, and turn the imaginary real.”
— unknown

“Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can’t articulate.”
— Mos Def

“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
— Leonard Bernstein

“Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.”
— Marco Tempest

“A newborn is soft and tender,
A crone, hard and stiff.
Plants and animals, in life, are supple and succulent;
In death, withered and dry.
So softness and tenderness are attributes of life,
And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death.”
— Tao Te Ching; 76 Flexibility

“One should always be a little improbable.”
— Oscar Wilde

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs

(the wheat fields? I don’t eat bread. The wheat for me is useless. The wheat fields remind me of nothing. And that, it’s sad! But you have hair the color of gold. So that would be marvelous when you have tamed me. The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I will love the sound of the wind in the wheat.” — The Fox in The Little Prince.)

—

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that´s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that´s all we have — to hold on tight until dawn.”
— excerpt from the book Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts (p. 346)

“There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness.”
— excerpt from the book Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts (Didier, p. 546)

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”
— excerpt from the book Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts (p. 629)

“‘Silence can wound as surely as the twisting lash,’ the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. (p. 870)
— excerpt from the book Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts